... Drought is a major natural disaster that causes severe social and economic losses. The prediction of regional droughts may provide important information for drought preparedness and farm irrigation. The existing drought prediction models are mainly based on a single weather station. Efforts need to be taken to develop a new multistation-based prediction model.This study optimizes the predictor sel ...

... Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and dechlorane plus (DP) in mangrove sediments and tissues of nine species from three Mangrove Reserves of Hainan Island were studied. The average concentrations of PBDEs and DP in mangrove leaves, branches, roots and fruits were 1048, 498, 546 and 364 pg g−1 dw, and 294, 181, 108 and 165 pg g−1 dw, respectively. The elevated PBDEs and DP concentrations in ma ...

... Mobilization of terrestrial-derived and recalcitrant black carbon (BC), including char and soot, from land to ocean exerts a significant influence on the global carbon cycle. This study elaborated the occurrence and spatial distributions of BC, char, and soot concentrations, as well as their burial fluxes, in the estuarine-inner shelf surface sediments of the East China Sea (ECS), an epicontinenta ...

... Short- and medium-chain chlorinated paraffins (SCCPs and MCCPs) were measured in sediment and suspended particulate matter (SPM) from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in the three seasons to elucidate their environmental behavior. The mean concentrations of ∑SCCPs and ∑MCCPs were 262 and 97.1 ng g−1 dw (dry weight) in sediment and 17,055 and 2573 ng g−1 dw in SPM, respectively, and ...

... Land use and land cover patterns in mainland China have substantially changed in the recent decades under the economic reform policies of the government. The terrestrial carbon cycle, particularly the net primary productivity (NPP), has been substantially changed on both local and national scales. With the growing concern over the effects of the terrestrial carbon cycle on global climate changes, ...

... Sediment cores from lakes have been used to reconstruct the historic deposition of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), especially in remote alpine areas. To reconstruct the deposition history of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in the Tibetan Plateau (TP), two sediment cores from Yamzho Yumco Lake were drilled and dated with high-resolution, from which 23 OCPs were analyzed in greater detail. Re ...

... A total of 76PM2.5 samples collected at Tuoji Island from November 2011 to January 2013 were used to analyze 15 congeners of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (∑15PAHs) and assess their toxic potency. The average ∑15PAHs was 15.34±8.87ngm⁻³, ranging from 4.24 to 40.62ngm⁻³ over the sampling period. BkF, BbF, Phe and BaP were dominant PAH congeners, contributing together 60.64% of the ∑15PAH concent ...

... The Tibetan Plateau (TP) serves as the background for persistent organic pollutants around the world. In addition to outside sources, local sources greatly contribute to the environment of the TP in recent decades. Mining activity could serve as an emerging source of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), although this issue has been neglected in the TP until now. To investigate the distribution ...

... In recent decades, the occurrence and severity of drought in China has had devastating impact on social and economic development. The increase in drought has been attributed to global warming. We used the high-accuracy self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) to investigate the variation in drought in China between 1961 and 2009 using the Mann-Kendall (MK), continuous wavelet transf ...

... Nepal is a landlocked country located between world's two most populous countries-India and China where high level of organochlorines pesticides has been reported from multi-environmental matrices. In this study, we investigated the occurrence, distributions and profile of selected OCP chemicals in surface soil samples (N=72) from four major cities of Nepal. Overall, the sum of total OCPs in soil ...

... Past studies have shown potentially increasing levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the Indian environment. This is the first attempt to investigate the occurrence of PCBs in surface soil and estimate diffusive air-soil exchange, both on a regional scale as well as at local level within the metropolitan environment of India. From the north, New Delhi and Agra, east, Kolkata, west, Mumbai ...

... The characteristic distribution patterns of hydrocarbons have been used for fingerprinting to identify their sources. The historical air depositions of hydrocarbons recorded in natural media help to understand the evolution of the air environment. Travertine is a natural acceptor of air deposition that settles on the ground layer by layer. To reconstruct the historical air environment of hydrocarb ...

... Revegetation facilitated by legume species introduction has been used for soil erosion control on the Loess Plateau, China. However, it is still unclear how vegetation and soil resources develop during this restoration process, especially over the longer term. In this study, we investigated the changes of plant aboveground biomass, vegetation cover, species richness and density of all individuals, ...

... Four sediment cores were collected along the Yangtze-derived sediment transport pathway in the inner shelf of the East China Sea (ECS) for OCP analysis. The sediment records of HCHs and DDTs in estuarine environment reflected remobilization of chemicals from enhanced soil erosion associated to extreme flood events or large scale land use transformation. The sediment records in the open sea, instea ...

... Metam-sodium (MS) is widely used as a soil pre-plant fumigant as methyl bromide is phased out of agriculture. However, the information about how fumigation with MS affects the soil microbial community is still limited. In this study, a 66-day-long experiment was conducted to ascertain the effects of MS on soil substrate-induced respiration (SIR), microbial biomass nitrogen (MBN), NH4+-N and NO3−-N ...

... Tempo-spatial patterns of mercury bioaccumulation and tropho-dynamics, and the potential for a reservoir effect were evaluated in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR, China) from 2011 to 2012, using total mercury concentrations (THg) and stable isotopes (δ13C and δ15N) of food web components (seston, aquatic invertebrates and fish). Hg concentrations in aquatic invertebrates and fish indicated a signi ...

... Samples of total suspended particulates (TSPs) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) were collected from 29th May to 1st July, 2013 at a regional background site in Bohai Rim, North China. Mass concentrations of particulate matter and carbonaceous species showed a total of 50% and 97% of the measured TSP and PM2.5 levels exceeded the first grade national standard of China, respectively. Daily concen ...

... Forty-two congeners of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) were detected for each of 27 surface-soil samples collected at an area near the Changwengluozha Glacier in the Central Tibetan Plateau (CTP), a remote background area at altitude from 5080 to 5217m. The total concentrations of BDEs in soils ranged from 15.3 to 248.0ng/kg, which were found to be positively correlated with the clay conten ...